 Hello and welcome to theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier here, joined by platform nine, Amelia Abel, the Chief Revenue Officer, really digging into the conversation around Kubernetes Cloud Native and the journey of this next generation Cloud. Amelia, thanks for coming in and joining me today. Thank you, thank you, great pleasure to be here. So, CRO, Chief Revenue Officer, so you're mainly in charge of serving the customers, making sure they're happy with the solution you guys have. That's right. And this market must be pretty exciting. Oh, it's very exciting and we're seeing a lot of new use cases coming up all the time. So, part of my job is to obtain new customers, but then, of course, service our existing customers and there's a constant evolution. Nothing is standing still right now. We've had all your co-founders on the show here. We've kind of talked about the trends and where you guys have come from, where you guys are going now. And it's interesting if you look at the Cloud Native market, the scale is still huge, just seeing now this next wave of AI coming on, which I call, that's the real web three in my mind in terms of like the next experiences. It still points to data infrastructure, scale. These next gen apps are coming and so that's being built on the previous generation of DevSecOps. And so, a lot of enterprises are having to grow up really, really fast and figure out, okay, I got to have scale. I got large scale data. I got horizontal scalability. I got to apply machine learning now, the new software engineering practice. And then, oh, by the way, I got the Kubernetes clusters, I got to manage containers with security problems. This is a really complicated but important area of build out right now in the marketplace. What are you seeing? So it's really important that the infrastructure is not the hindrance in these cases. And one of our customers is in fact, a large AI company. And we met with them yesterday and asked them, why are you giving that to us? You've got really smart engineers. They can run and create the infrastructure in a custom way that you want it. And they said, we've got to be core to our business. There's plenty of work to do just on delivering the AI capabilities. And there's plenty of work to do. We can't get bogged down in the infrastructure. We don't want to have people running the engine. We want them driving the car. We want them creating value on top of that. So they can't have the infrastructure being the bottleneck for them. It's interesting, the AI companies, that's their value proposition to their customers is that they don't want the technical talent working on non-differentiated, heavy lifting things. And automate those and scale it up. Can you talk about the problem that you guys have solved? Because there's a lot going on here. You can look at all aspects of the DevOps scale. There's a lot of little problems, some big problems. What do you guys focus in on? What's the bullseye for platform known? Okay, so the bullseye is that Kubernetes infrastructure is really hard. It's really hard to create and run. So we introduce a time-to-market efficiency. Let's get this up and running and let's get you into production and producing results for your customers fast. But at the same time, let's reduce your cost and complexity and increase reliability. So yeah. And what are some of the things that they're having problems with that are breaking? Is it more of updates on code? Is it size of the, I mean, clusters they have? What is it more operational? What are some of the things that kind of get them to call you guys up? It's the operations. It's all operations. So what happens is that if you have a look at Kubernetes platform, it's made up of many, many components. And that's where it gets complex. It's not just Kubernetes. There's load balancers, there's networking, there's observability. All these things have to operate together and all the piece parts have to be upgraded and maintained. The integrations need to work. You need to have probes into the system to predict where problems can be coming. So the operational part of it is complex. So you need to be observing not only your clusters and the health of the clusters and the nodes and so on, but the health of the platform itself. We're going to get Peter Frey in on here after, talk about some of the technical issues and deployments, but what's the big decision for the customer because there's kind of, there's two schools of thought. One is I'm going to build my own and have my team build it or I'm going to go with a partner, say platform nine. What's the trade-off there? Because it seems to me that there's a certain area of where it's core competency, but I can outsource it or partner with it and work with platform nine versus trying to take it all on internally, of which requires more cost. So there's a line where you kind of like, figure out that, customers have to figure out that piece. What's your view on that? Because I'm hearing that more people are saying, hey, I want to focus my people on solutions, the app side, not so much the ops, the trade-off, how do you guys? It's a really interesting question because most companies think they have two options. It's either a DIY option and they love that. Engineers love playing with the new and the latest. And then they think the other option is going to cloud, public cloud and have it semi-managed by them. And you get very different out of those. So in the DIY, you get flexibility because you get to choose your infrastructure. But then you've got all the complexities of the DIY piece. You've got to not only choose all your components, but you've got to keep them working. Now, if you go to public cloud option, you lose flexibility because a lot of those choices are made for you, but you gain agility because quite frankly, it's really easy to spin up clusters. So what we are is that in the middle, we bring the agility and the flexibility because we bring the control plane that allows you to spin up clusters and lifecycle manage them very quickly. So the agility is there, but you can do it on the infrastructure of your choice. And in the DIY culture, one of the hardest things to do actually is to convince them they don't have to do it themselves. They can focus on higher value activities, which are more focused on delivering outcomes to their customers. So you provide the solution that allows them to feel like they're building it themselves. Correct. They get these scale and speed and the efficiencies of the ops side. So it's kind of the best of both worlds. It's not a full outsource. Right. You're bringing them in to make their jobs easier. Right, that's right. So they get choices. They get choices on how they build it, and then we run and operate it for them. But they have all the observability. The benefit is that if we are managing their operations and most of our customers choose the managed operations piece of it, then if something goes wrong, we fix that. And they get told, oh, by the way, you had a problem with dealt with it. But in the other model is they've got to create all that observability themselves and they've got to get ahead of the issues themselves. And then they've got to raise tickets to whoever they need to raise tickets to, whereas we have things like auto ticket generation and so on where, look, just drive the car. Let us worry about the engine and all of that. Let us deal with that. And you can choose whatever you want about the engine, but let us manage it for you, so. What do you say to folks out there that may have a need for Platform 9? What's the signals inside their company that they should be calling you guys up and leaning in with Platform 9? Is it more sprawl on clusters? Is it more errors? Is it more tickets? Is it more hassle? What are some of the signs if someone's watching this and say, hey, I have an issue with this? I would say if there's operational inefficiencies, you can't get things to market fast enough because you're building this and it's just taking too long. You're spending way too much time operationally on the infrastructure, then you're not using your resources where they should best be used and that is delivering services to the customer. Admit Huron for International Women's Day and she was talking about how they left to solve complex problems on the engineering team at Platform 9. It's going to get pretty complex with the edge emerging and the cloud native on-premises distributed computing essentially is what it is. That's kind of the core DNA of the team. How does that translate to the customers? Because IT seems to be, okay, I have virtual machines, we're great. Now I got to scale up and convert over or transform to containers, Kubernetes and then large scale app applications. Right. So when it comes to edge, it gets complex pretty fast because it's highly distributed. So how do you have standardization and governance across all the different edge locations? So what we bring into play is an ability to, at each edge location, provision from bare metal up all the way up to the application. So let's say you have thousands of stores and you want to modernize those stores. Rather than having a server being sent somewhere to have an image loaded up and then sent that and then you've got to send a technical guy to the store and you've got to implement it all there. Forget all that. That's just a ridiculous waste of time. So what we've done is we've created the ability where the server can just be sent to the store. You can get your barista or your chef just to plug it in. Right. You don't need to send any technical person over there. As long as we have access to it, we get access to it and we provision the whole thing from bare metal up and then we can maintain it according to the standards that are needed and upgrade accordingly. And that gives standardization across all your stores or edge locations or 5G towers or whatever it is, distribution centers, and we can create nice governance and good standardization which allows them to innovate fast as well. This is a real opportunity for you guys. Yeah. This is an advantage from your expertise. Yes. The edge piece dropping in a box, self-provisioning. That's right. Can people do that? What's the... No, actually it's very difficult to do. From my understanding, we're the only people that can provision it from bare metal up, right? So if anyone has a different story, I'd love to hear about that, but that's my understanding today. That's good value. Tell about the value of the customer. What kind of scope do you got? Can you scope some of the customer environments you have from small to the large? How, give us an idea of the order of magnitude of the customer? So small customers may have 20 clusters or something like that, 20 nodes, I beg your pardon. Our large customers, like we're scaling one particular distributed environment from 2,200 nodes to 10,000 nodes by the end of this year and 26,000 nodes next year. We have another customer that's scaling up to 10,000 nodes this year as well. So we have some very large scale, but some smaller ones too. And we're happy to work with either end. Okay, so pretend I'm a customer. I'm really, I got Payne and Kubernetes. Like I want to, I can't hire enough people. I want to have my people focus. What's the pitch? Okay, so skill shortage is something that everyone is facing right now. And if you've got skill shortage, it's going to be really hard to hire if you're competing against really, you know, high salary, you know, offering companies that are out there. So the pitch is let us do it for you. We have, we have a team of excellent, probably the best Kubernetes engineers on the planet. We will create your environment for you. We will get it up and running. We will allow you to, you know, run your application, just consume the platform. We'll run it for you. We'll have SLAs and uptimes guaranteed and you can just focus on delivering the software and the value needed to your customers. What are some of the testimonials that you get from people just anecdotally? What do they say? Oh my God, you guys see our butts. This is amazing. We just shipped our code out much faster. Some of the things that you hear. So the number one thing I hear is it just works. All right, we don't have to worry about it. It just works. So that's a really great feedback that we get. The other thing I hear is if we do have issues that your team are amazing, they fix things, they're proactive, we really enjoy working with you. So from that perspective, that's great. But the other side of it is we hear things like if we were to do that ourselves, we would have taken six to 12 months to build that and you guys have just saved us six to 12 months. The other thing that we hear is with the same two engineers we started on 100 nodes. We're now running thousands of nodes. We have not had to increase the size of the team and expand and scale exponentially. Awesome, what's next for you guys? What's on your plate? Yeah. What's some of the goals you have? Yeah, so growth of course is a CRO. You don't get away from that. We've got some very exciting actually initiatives coming up. One of the things that we're seeing a lot of demand for and is in the area of virtualization, bringing virtual machine, virtual containers. Sorry, I'm saying that all wrong. Bringing the virtual machines onto the cloud native infrastructure using Kubevert technology. So that provides an excellent stepping stone for those guys who are in the virtualization world and they can't move to containers. They can't refactor their applications and workloads fast enough. So just bring your virtual machine and put it onto the container infrastructure. So we're seeing a lot of demand for that because it provides an excellent stepping stone. Why not use Kubernetes to orchestrate virtual, the virtual world? And then we've got some really interesting cost optimization. So a lot of migration kind of thinking around VMs. Oh, tremendous. The VM world is just massively bigger than the container world right now. So you can't ignore that. So we're providing basically the evolution, the journey for the customers to utilize the greatest of technologies without having to do that in a way that just breaks the bank and they can't get there fast enough. So we provide those stepping stones for them. Yeah. Thank you for coming on and sharing the update on Platform 9. Congratulations on your big accounts you have. Thank you. The world could get more complex, which means more customers. Thank you. Thank you, John. Appreciate it. I'm John Furrier. You're watching Platform 9 and the Kube Conversations here. Thanks for watching.